The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification Quotes

“You cannot love God if you are under the continual secret suspicion that he is really your enemy! … You simply cannot love God unless you know and understand how much he loves you. … In the gospel, you can come to know that God truly loves you through Christ. When you have this assurance, you can even love your enemies, because you know that you are reconciled to God. You know that God’s love will make people’s hatred of you work together for your good.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification: Growing in Holiness by Living in Union with Christ

“Therefore they conclude that God has certainly made sincere obedience to be the condition of our salvation. And they have endeavoured to new-model the Protestant doctrine, and to interpret the Holy Scriptures in a way agreeable and subservient to this their only sure foundation of holiness.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“Though Christ is in heaven, and we on earth, yet He can join our souls and bodies to His at such a distance without any substantial change of either, by the same infinite Spirit dwelling in Him and us; and so our flesh will become His, when it is quickened by His Spirit; and His flesh ours, as truly as if we ate His flesh and drank His blood.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“They that are convinced of their own sin and misery do commonly first think to tame the flesh, and to subdue and root out its lusts, and to make their corrupt nature to be better natured and inclined to holiness by their struggling and wrestling with i”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“God has abundantly discovered to us in His Word that His method in bringing men from sin to holiness of life is first, to make them know that He loves them and that their sins are blotted out.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“before”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“You must take special care to act faith in your meditation; mix the Word of God's grace with it, or else it will not profit you (Heb. 4:2). And if you set the lovingkindness of God frequently before your eyes, by meditating on it believingly, you will be strengthened to walk in the truth (Ps. 26:3); and, by beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, you will be changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3: 18). This kind of meditation is sweet, and delightful to those that are guided to it by the spirit of faith, and it needs not the help of such artificial methods as the vulgar cannot easily learn. You may let your thoughts run in it at liberty, without confining them to any rules of method. You will find your souls much enlivened by it, and enriched with the grace of God; which cannot be effected by any other kind of meditation, though it be never so methodical, and curiously framed according to the rules of art.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“The kingdom of heaven, or the grace of Christ within us is like leaven in meal, which does not unite itself perfectly to the meal in an instant, but by degrees until the whole be leavened (Matt. 13:33); or, like the morning light that expels darkness, shining more and more unto the perfect day (Prov. 4:18).”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“For if you make your own faith, love or good qualifications to be your first and principal foundation, and you build Christ on them, instead of building all on Christ, you invert the order of the gospel, and Christ will profit you nothing.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“If the cripple lay not the whole weight of his body upon a strong staff, but part of it upon a rotten one, he is like to receive a fall. If the swimmer will not commit his body wholly to the water to bear him up, but catch at weeds, or struggle to feel out ground, he may sink to the bottom. Christ will be all our salvation, or nothing. If we seek to be saved any other way, as the Galatians did by circumcision, Christ will profit us nothing (Gal. 5:2).”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“Thus many believers walk heavily in the bitterness of their souls, conflicting with fears and doubtings all their days. And this is the cause that they have so little courage and fervency of spirit in the ways of God, and that they so much mind earthly things, and are so afraid of sufferings and death; and if they get some assurance by the reflex act of faith, they often soon lose it again by sins and temptations. The way to avoid these evils is to get your assurance, and to maintain it, and renew it upon all occasions by the direct act of faith, by trusting assuredly on the name of the Lord, and staying yourself on your God, when you walk in darkness, and see no light in any of your own qualifications (Isa. 50:10). I doubt not but the experience of choice Christians will bear witness to this truth.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“2. The difference between the law and gospel does not at all consist in this, that the one requires perfect doing; the other, only sincere doing; but in this, that the one requires doing; the other, not doing, but believing for life and salvation. Their terms are different, not only in degree, but in their whole nature. The apostle Paul opposes the believing required in the gospel to all doing for life, as the condition proper to the law (Gal. 3:12). The law is not of faith, but the man that does them shall live in them (Rom. 10:5). To him that does not work, but believes on Him that justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness (Rom. 4:5). If we seek salvation by ever so easy and mild a condition of works, we do in this way bring ourselves under the terms of the law, and become debtors to fulfil the whole law in perfection, though we intended to engage ourselves only to fulfil it in part (Gal. 5:3), for the law is a complete declaration of the only terms by which God will judge all that are not brought to despair of procuring salvation by any of their own works, and to receive it as a gift freely given to them by the grace of God in Christ. So that all that seek salvation, right or wrong, knowingly or ignorantly, by any works, less or more, whether invented by their own superstition, or commanded by God in the Old or New Testament, shall at last stand or fall according to these terms.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“when they stand in competition with our enjoyment of Him,”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification